


Apotheosis

by lusilly



Series: Earth-28 [27]
Category: Batman (Comics), DCU, DCU (Comics)
Genre: F/M, League of Assassins - Freeform, Leviathan - Freeform, Power Couple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-28
Updated: 2015-04-28
Packaged: 2018-03-26 03:12:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3834850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lusilly/pseuds/lusilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the absence of the Demon's Head, Leviathan run the League. Before Tallie can ascend to her birthright, she must first prove to them she deserves it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Apotheosis

**Author's Note:**

> This is an immediate continuation of A Million Miles Away. It is the furthest-along story in Earth-28 canon as of yet, dealing with Natalia Nayar Wayne, adopted daughter of Damian Wayne, after Damian's mysterious death.

            When you reach the League, you expect it to be in shambles. The Demon’s Head was murdered, and no one had touched his birthright in the forty-seven days it’s been since their last contact with him.

            (Forty-seven days: a week since their return from the desert, a week since that night they set off from the wedding in the big blue house in Kansas. A week since their mourning for her father might have ended, but neither of them are sure they even mourned at all.)

            Instead, you find that the League is organized and independent. They express their most deepest regrets at the passing of your father, and then they offer you water and wine, and when you tell them you are there to claim your birthright, they calmly pass you a plate of dates and ask if you are seated comfortably enough.

            “I am the Demon’s Head,” you begin, your eyes glinting with unclaimed power, and they don’t even bother meeting your burning gaze. Beside you, you can feel the anxiety emanating in waves from the love of your life, and he holds tightly onto your hand.

            “And we,” they say, one speaking for many, “are Leviathan. Cut off the head and many more take its place. You need not claim this ascension, Natalia.”

            They call you by your full first name, which strikes like a stone against the flint of your heart. You imagine this is something they picked up from your father, who only ever called you _Natalia_ when speaking to people who didn’t know you. You liked that; you loved that your name was a secret that he reserved for you and for the family, but not for strangers. When you are called _Tallie_ , you know you are home. When you are called _Natalia_ , your father was sure to teach you, then you know that you cannot trust them.

            “We respect tradition,” they tell you. “We respect lineage. But above all else, we respect power.”

            They ask you to prove yourself, first. You say you will, and they watch you dispassionately, as if you are an animal behind glass, fierce and maybe dangerous, but of which they have no reason to be afraid because you cannot touch them.

            Beside you, Nabil squeezes your hand tighter.

\--

            You kill for the first time in Prague. It was an accident, really: Leviathan told you to bring back a lock of his daughter’s hair and when you bend down to delicately clip it off as she sleeps, the dim light illuminates a trial of black and blue along her shoulders, down her back. Her face and neck are pristine, skin flawless and unmarred. It is the worst of men, you think, who are vain enough to pretend it makes a difference what people see.

            Your entire life, you have witnessed the fights of your father and your mother and your cousins and all of your family. What you never quite understood was this: there are long drawn-out fights in which your father could land blow after blow against his opponents, and finally beat him into submission. These battles are less about injuring the opponent and more about holding back. It is very easy to bash a man’s head in until he is dead but it is very hard to bash just hard enough that he is unconscious with minimal brain damage.

            There are long fake-fights in which you take your time tiring him out, always one blow away from real destruction. And then there are real fights, deadly fights – fights that last thirty seconds and are over quick and dirty, fights that end with blood on your hands and a corpse growing cold.

            This is how you kill a man your very first time: in an alley, he staggers away from a brothel and you head down from the street, your hands stuffed in your pockets against the stinging wintry air. He glances up and grins, and he begins to call you sweet names in Czech, and then you take your hands out of your pocket and with all the force you can muster, you lodge a knife in between his ribcage. Ever the professional, he tears the knife out himself and fights back. With the flat heel of your hand, you drive his nose upwards into his brain. He falls. You do not bring Leviathan the lock of his daughter’s hair. You bring them his head.

\--

            Nabil is not happy, but he makes love to you all the same. The only difference is that it used to seem like a medicine for him, a salve, a brief respite in which he could pretend that everything was all right, that he was all right, that all would be well. Now when he touches you, it almost feels like a prayer.

\--

            In Arabic, in the middle of the night when he thinks you’re asleep, he prays for you.

\--

            As you leave Prague, you take him first to the river. You take the knife, still copper-smelling from blood, and you fling it into the water.

\--

            A butcher in Bosnia; a midwife in St. Petersburg; a television producer in Nairobi; the leader of a political party in Paris.

            (Paris, which had always been your favorite city. Paris, where you delayed your return to Leviathan for a full day so that you could walk the streets with Nabil, pretend that you were something that it could never satisfy you to be. On a houseboat with the Eiffel Tower visible from the skylight, you fucked him sweetly and softly and out of his mind. He is never more beautiful, you think, than when he is pink-faced and panting and utterly spent.)

            Next were a restaurant owner in Taiwan and a millionaire expat in Seoul. Then a woman in India, a woman who was not yet old but who already had lived her life, who had four grandchildren and a fifth on the way. You don’t generally question your assignments. You know that Leviathan is playing with you at this point, testing your limits, impressed with you and curious to find how far you can stretch, how much you can bend before you break.

            You watch the woman for sixteen days. Nabil doesn’t say anything. It’s clear he knows that this is a decision you must make.

            On the seventeenth day, her grandchild is born. You wonder, vaguely, how a woman who loves her children’s children so dearly could have abandoned her firstborn daughter.

\--

            You don’t kill her, but you return to Leviathan with a lock of the baby’s hair which they tell you to keep.

            In your quarters, when you do nothing more than hold onto him, he brushes his fingers through your hair and asks you gently, “Don’t you want to know for sure?”

            You’ve talked about this with him, on occasion. Back when you both felt guilty for what you were doing, back when he was desperate for justification. “Don’t you want to know?” he’d asked you, again and again until you told him to stop.

            You kiss him. “Does it matter?” you ask.

            In another time, he might have argued. But very little seems to matter anymore, to you.

\--

            Your final task is a name that doesn’t make sense.

            When you stand before Leviathan you used to imagine them as the three kings of judgment day. Now it becomes clear that the very axes of the Earth are shifting, the cardinal directions recalibrating around you, and suddenly when you stand before them you are starting to think that this is _your_ throne room, not theirs.

            For months now, you have done nothing but take their assignments and follow their direction. To the rest of the League you are invisible. You do not exist. Part of you wants to think the trail you picked up in Goa is your mother’s attempt at making sure you are safe, but you were always prone to underestimate your mother.

            Leviathan gives you a name and even Nabil behind you stiffens in surprise.

            “I can’t kill her,” you say. “She’s already dead.”

            “Bring us her corpse,” they reply, not unkindly, “and you may take the Demon’s Head.”

\--

            When you lie with him that night, you barely touch each other. The truth settles in your bones and makes you both old and tired, guilty and sick.

            “He didn’t kill her,” you say, and you feel empty as you do.

            Nabil can’t answer you.

            He knew his life meant the death of your brother.

            He had not known it meant the death of an innocent man.

\--

            In Berbera, you find a woman and a man with their throats newly slashed. For one moment it hurts you: they stare with filmy eyes like those of your dead father as you tried to apologize, tried to offer him an olive branch to soothe his grief-stricken anger.

            Gently you pass a hand over each of their faces. With their eyes closed, they look like any other young couple. They could be asleep.

            Your grandmother seems younger than you are.

            A sound rings out through the small home, and it sends the hairs on the back of your neck standing straight up.

            When you turn around, Nabil stands in the doorway. He is pale, and in his arms he holds a wailing baby.

\--

            So this is what Tom did. This is the deal he struck in order to pass the gift of the Demon’s Head to his own father, and to provide his grandmother with a way out, an exit from the life that never ends. They faked her death, she forfeited her title, and he took the fall. All so she could have a life: so she could have a husband, and a child.

            The man, you know, was religious. While Nabil holds the baby, you perform the funeral prayer. You stay until they are buried.

\--

            When you ascend to the Demon’s Head, you do so with your lover standing just behind you, your daughter held in his arms. Leviathan does not question this. Once you claim your birthright, Leviathan dissolves into the background, into the many which make up the one. But you know that this is their strength, and you know that they benefit when you think they are gone. So you refuse to think that. Instead, you are always cautious, always vigilant. Always, as your mother taught you, keeping one eye over your shoulder.

            As you plan to topple empires, Nabil plays in the garden with the baby.


End file.
